I remember so clearly the mood of my teen years. Stepping off the school bus at fifteen and sixteen into the quiet of solitude of the two block walk to my house, I was buzzing inside with relationship challenges, academic anxieties, and a mix of exhaustion and deep fatigue. The teen years are difficult years for most. I did not have anything like the perspective I have now on the forces that were at work within me. Still, I carried them with me everywhere I went.
I remember carrying a load of books as I walked, believing I’d open them all yet never doing so. My winter coat was never buttoned and the cold New York wind washing over me felt like relief. I was alone except for the wind and I loved it. The other kids quickly dispersed across yards and down side-streets. This moment of peace was short lived as just ahead was different sort of dark cloud, a heaviness that had begun to seep into my bones.
THE EMPTY DRIVEWAY
The empty driveway, the closed front door, the silence I met as I climbed the stairs to the front hall closet where I hung my coat and the chair where I placed my stack of books. My mother was busy in the kitchen. She was always busy with something, her sewing, her plants, her canning, her tutoring of Vietnamese refugees. I was compelled to step into that space to greet her, a force of habit years in the making, before slipping down the hall and into my bedroom, my sanctuary, my oasis, the island upon which I lay and cried a million tears.
I can’t remember now whether or not I shucked my school clothes for something more comfortable. It seems I must have. I don’t remember taking off my skirt and blouse and hanging them up in the closet. I was never a neat kid, ordinarily preoccupied with thoughts and overwhelm. Most likely I tossed them on my desk chair – the desk Dad made me from two old desks that once belonged to someone else. They were 50s style desk with two legs on one side and a row of drawers on the other. He used the base of each, removing the original top then attaching a new board that extended the length of the wall and rested on each desk end. Now a desk spanned one whole end of my bedroom, a row of drawers at each end. He placed a mirror over one section and that became my “makeup table”; over the other were book shelves and that was the end where homework was supposed to take place.
AN ONLY CHILD
The remodeling of my bedroom was a gift for my 16th birthday. My sister, the last of my four siblings had left for college that year. I was quite suddenly an “only” child. I think now my parents must have been trying to cheer me up with the remodeling gift. I spent hours pouring over wallpaper books in the small stationary/hardware store on Lafayette Avenue in our little hometown. I remember the moment the perfect wallpaper leapt off the page. Great washes of pink and yellow and orange – though I would have left the orange out if I could – with random ribbons of gold raised sparkly stuff interspersed soon covered the wall behind my desk. Metal wall brackets and standards held matching stained boards creating the wall of bookshelves I requested. Dad painted the rest of the walls in the bedroom a matching pink, a little brighter, deeper pink than I might have chosen myself.
I placed my guitar on the long top shelf, and books, pictures and knickknacks on the remaining ones. An old heavily painted white gloss dresser and a full sized headboard that my parents had upholstered in faux white leather for my oldest sister were now mine and completed the make over. It seems I acquired the best of the furniture hand-me-downs and I was a pleased recipient. It felt like a key to adulthood, but it also felt like a reach to find the keyhole.
KAHLIL GIBRAN
I spent many afternoons lying on the floor listening to a record of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet set to music as it played on my small portable record player; or Rod McKuen’s voice as he purred his poem “The Sea” into my soul. I understand these afternoons now as a form of meditation, my first introduction perhaps. Each day I escaped the challenges of the day and the challenges of my home life by disappearing into an interior world. Now, so many years later, I believe these quiet moments of my own choosing lay the foundation for a connection to something other than the concrete world. Being touched, connecting to something “other” created a love tattoo on my heart, quietly pointing me to my North Star.
Meditation is not an exact science, although you will find a thorough examination of the research and experience of the scientific community that attests to its efficacy for the treatment of illness and disease in Full Catastrophe Living. It’s become a textbook of sorts for meditation and a first line of defense to those who question mediation’s validity. It is worth reading as most non-meditators or beginner meditators benefit from a little convincing and coercion.
MEDITATION
Meditation is something one must experience, firsthand, not only to learn, but to practice, understand and reap the full benefits. It’s a practice with often surprising results. We have no idea what we are missing until we’ve been meditators for an extended period of time.
You see, meditation is unlike anything else we experience day to day in the external world. Prayer may come closest, and silence is its forerunner. But meditation is about the quieting of the mind, something that is difficult to experience in any other way. Prayer can be an avenue to quiet but too often it is just more mind chatter. In a full meditative state one experiences a silence the mind that makes space for deep listening.
TEEN SUICIDE
I believe that a significant reason for the rise in teen suicide is precisely because teens don’t often enter their interior quiet space. Technology interferes with our need for silence and reflection like nothing before it. On those afternoons where I lay on the floor listening to poetic words my mind let go of the endless self-talk, mostly negative, and listened to something deeper within me. The resonance was what mattered. I stepped into a vibration that connected me to myself, to my soul, to the core of my being and to the whole of the universe. It filled the hole in my heart left by absent siblings, distant and disinterested parents, classmates who didn’t get me. It filled it in a way that nothing else could. I can’t even imagine the toll today’s technology might have had on me.
Today’s teen are more apt to be fill their emptiness with TikTok, Instagram, texting, scrolling Facebook and in the process be assaulted by their own expectations and perceived failures. There is no room for quieting the mind, quite the opposite. It’s like extending the school day and all its turbulence by another six hours and perhaps intensifying it. It would have been a nightmare for me that I might not have survived.
We all, at every age, benefit from silence, mediation, and/or solitude to stay connected to ourselves, to remember who we are, to tap into a space that is uniquely our own. Call it meditation or call it vegging out, it doesn’t matter what it’s called as long as it calls us home.
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